Zadie Smith: Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays

Kingsley Amis:(laughing) That’s right, yes…

But Forster was clever about even this kind of literary insincerity: “The simple view is that creation can only proceed from sincerity. But the facts don’t always bear this out. The insincere, the half sincere, may on occasion contribute.” Lucky for the English that this should be so. On the third of October 1932, Forster considers a critical study of Wordsworth, a writer who, like Amis, “moved from being a Bolshie… to being a die-hard.” The study argues that Wordsworth “had a great deal to cover up,” having had an affair and an illegitimate child with a French woman, Annette Vallon, all of which he kept hidden. Back in England he made a hypocritical fetish of his own puritanism and lived “to be a respectable and intolerant old man.” Something calcified in Wordsworth: he ended up hating the France he’d loved as a youth, becoming a “poet of conventional morality,” more concerned with public reputation than with poetry itself. Forster too had a good deal to hide and kept it hidden; one feels in his attention to the Wordsworth story the recognition of a morality tale. It is almost as if, with the door of his private sexuality firmly closed, Forster willed himself to open every window. This curious inverse effect is most noticeable in the honesty and flexibility of his criticism. On his affection for Jane Austen: “She’s English, I’m English, and my fondness for her may well be a family affair.” On a naval book that celebrates the simplicity of the sailor’s life: “I don’t know whether I am overpraising the book. Its values happen to coincide with my own, and one does then tend to overpraise.” He is gently amused to learn of J. Donald Adams’s (then editor of the New York Times Book Review ) suspicion of the recent crop of American fiction:

The twenties and thirties of this century were unsatisfactory, Mr Adams thinks, because they contributed nothing positive; they pricked holes in the old complacency (like Sinclair Lewis) or indulged in private fantasies (like James Branch Cabell) or played about frivolously like Scott Fitzgerald.

Here’s the funny thing about literary criticism: it hates its own times, only realizing their worth twenty years later. And then, twenty years after that, it wildly sentimentalizes them, out of nostalgia for a collective youth. Condemned cliques become halcyon “movements,” annoying young men, august geniuses. Unlike Adams, Forster had the gift of recognizing good writing while it was still young. Enthusiastically he hails Rosamond Lehmann, William Plomer, Christopher Isherwood. And it’s only 1932! He defends their modern quality against English nostalgia: “If they still believe in what Keats called the holiness of the heart’s imagination, then aren’t we with them, and does it make any difference to us that they don’t use Keats’ words?”

Which reminds us of the simplest and greatest pleasure of this book: Forster gets it right, often. He’s right about Strachey’s Queen Victoria, right about the worth of H. G. Wells and Rebecca West and Aldous Huxley; right about Eliot’s Ash Wednesday and Russell’s History of Western Philosophy. Sitting on a 1944 panel titled “Is the novel dead?” [22]he is right to answer in the negative.

The editors of this volume, making heavy weather of it, claim “Forster’s talks engaged and helped shape British culture.” I imagine Forster would have been surprised by that statement and perplexed by their concern for his literary status. He thought the words highbrow and lowbrow “responsible for more unkind feelings and more silly thinking than any other pair of words I know.” He was not the sort to get riled up on that subject. He was a popular novelist. Who could say he didn’t know his craft? And not in the workaday way Somerset Maugham knew his. There’s magic and beauty in Forster, and weakness, and a little laziness, and some stupidity. He’s like us. Many people love him for it. We might finish with what Forster himself would say about these talks, what in fact he did say: “There is something cajoling and ingratiating about them which cannot be exorcised by editing, and they have been the devil to reproduce.” But Forster was always a little too humble, a tad disingenuous. His talks are humane and charming, like everything he wrote, and on top of that, they’re good fun to read, and if not quite right for a lecture hall, they’re perfect for a lazy afternoon in an armchair. The title again, for those who missed it: The BBC Talks of E. M. Forster . The price is $59.95.

In 1873, the young Henry James reviewed George Eliot’s Middlemarch . An odd review, neither rave nor pan. Eliot represented the past-James hoped to be the future. “It sets a limit,” he wrote, “to the development of the old-fashioned English novel.” James’s objection to Middlemarch is familiar: there’s too much of it. He found “its diffuseness makes it too copious a dose of pure fiction.” He would have preferred a more “organized, moulded, balanced composition.” Such a lot of characters! And so often lacking the grander human qualities. With one exception: Dorothea. She alone has an “indefinable moral elevation” and “exhales a sort of aroma of spiritual sweetness.” It is of the “career of [this] obscure St. Theresa” that he should have liked to read more. Finding Dorothea the most admirable character, he imagines she “was to have been the central figure.” He wonders what went wrong. Certainly the doctor Lydgate is interesting enough, but his story “yields in dignity” to Dorothea’s, and as for hapless Fred Vincy-why are we presented with such a “fullness of detail” on “this common-place young gentleman, with his somewhat meagre tribulations and his rather neutral egotism”?

A famous query opens chapter 29 of Middlemarch: “But why always Dorothea?” It’s neat that James’s complaint-essentially “But why always Fred?”-should be the inverse reflection of it. You might say of Henry and George what the novel says of Lydgate and Rosamund: between him and her indeed there was that total missing of each other’s mental track… James can’t understand why Middlemarch should stray so far from Dorothea, lingering on Lydgate, Fred and the rest. Cautiously he asks: was it an unconscious instinct or a deliberate plan?

Questions concerning the gestation of novels aren’t often answerable, but Middlemarch is an exception. Eliot kept a journal, and in 1869 she records work on “a novel called Middlemarch” competing with research for “a long poem on Timolean.” This Middlemarch is the tale of a young, progressive doctor called Lydgate whose arrival in a provincial town coincides with the 1832 Reform Bill debates. Work on it goes slowly, painfully-there’s more hope for the poem. By the end of the year they’re both abandoned . What happens next is interesting. In November, Eliot begins a second story, Miss Brooke, and finds she can write a hundred pages of it in a month. To a novelist, fluidity is the ultimate good omen; suddenly difficult problems are simply solved, intractable structural knots loosen themselves, and you come upon the key without even recognizing that this is what you hold. By late 1871, the Lydgate and Dorothea stories are joined (by the creaky yet workable plot device of Mr. Brooke’s dinner party), and like the two hands of a piece for the piano, a contrapuntal structure is set in motion, in which many melodic lines make equal claim on our attention. The result is that famous Eliot effect, the narrative equivalent of surround sound. Here is the English novel at its limit, employing an unprecedented diversity of “central characters,” so different from the centrifugal narratives of Austen. The novel is a riot of subjectivity. To Mary Garth, Fred Vincy is the central character in Middlemarch. To Ladislaw, it is Dorothea. To Lydgate, it is Rosamund Vincy. To Rosamund, it is herself. And authorial attention is certainly diffuse; it seems to focus not simply on those who are most good, or most attractive or even most interesting, but on those who are “there.” Unconscious instinct or deliberate plan? That Lydgate and Dorothea’s stories existed separately, that Dorothea’s story came second, points firmly at deliberation. Yet to say so is to give a question of fiction a factual answer, and the proper rebuff to James comes from a different place, not the place of fact, but the seat of feeling. James mistakes the sensibility of the novel: